Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood (100 page)

Still, Dickinson wasn’t pleased with her first day of work, on an introductory scene of her character getting off the stage, which didn’t make it into the film. “I hated my costume and I was intimidated in the acting because I felt I didn’t look good. It was a very tough first day, with five or six takes of every shot. I just thought the laugh Howard wanted me to do was out of character. I have
such a hearty laugh.” She gradually learned that Hawks wasn’t about to act things out for her. “He didn’t want to show me how to do it. If he showed me what he wanted, it wouldn’t be my own original approach. He was looking for me to be original. It made it tough because you didn’t know what he wanted.… When he liked something, the most he would do was smile and nod his head. It was difficult and
frustrating,
but a thrill.” Dickinson added, “I think he liked me, but I don’t think he had a thing for me. I was so hung up on the fella I was with that I wouldn’t have noticed.” In general, Dickinson described Hawks personally as “pleasant and polite, but not overly friendly” with her. But as a director, she felt he was “subtle and classy.”

For the climactic scene of Burdette’s men being blown
out of the barn with dynamite, the art director, Kay Kuter, put lots of colored paper inside to intensify the look of the explosion, but when the place blew on the first try, all the flying colors made it look, in Hawks’s words, “like a big Chinese firecracker. We all started to laugh.” Kuter had to rebuild the entire structure for a retake, which went according to plan.

On May 28, the company
finished work in Tucson after twenty-four days—on schedule, something unheard of for Hawks. Shooting resumed in the jail set on Warner Bros. stage four in Burbank on June 2. For the next seven and a half weeks, filming proceeded in quiet, surefooted, good-natured fashion, which vastly enhanced the profoundly lovable nature of the picture; faced with the evidence on the screen, it is inconceivable
that a film such as
Rio Bravo
could have resulted from an unhappy, stressful, strife-ridden shoot.

Now that they were back in the studio, concentrating on the more intimate scenes between handfuls of people, Hawks encouraged the actors more than ever to contribute, asking what they thought their characters would do in given situations. Brennan was the most adept at this, while Wayne was best
when his lines were set and he could place the full force of his personality behind them. Hawks continued to rewrite and rearrange dialogue, often with the help of the ever-present Furthman, but not in significant ways, and he only rarely made more than two or three takes of any given shot, so assured were he, his actors, and his crew. A couple of exceptions were two key scenes with Wayne and Dickinson.
Hawks found the scene in which Chance tells Feathers she has to leave town particularly difficult to stage, and Wayne had a lot of trouble with it as well; Hawks actually favors Dickinson considerably in the cutting, covering up Wayne’s rare uncertain work in the scene. The final scene, in which Feathers interprets Chance’s threat to arrest her as his way of saying he loves her, was also a
big problem, and Hawks had the actors try it four or five different ways. Dickinson recalled, “Finally, Howard said, ‘This time, half-way through, why don’t you start crying?’ So, with no preparation, we did it that way and that was the one we used.” When filming was completed on July 23 in sixty-one days, Hawks was, amazingly, only six days over schedule.

Not holding his participation in
High Noon
against him, Hawks brought Dimitri Tiomkin in to write the score, which included the song for Ricky Nelson as well as one Dean Martin sings in jail. Most memorable, however, was “De Guello,” the haunting theme for trumpet that was supposedly played by General Santa Ana’s men at the Alamo and that Joe Burdette uses to spook Chance and his crew. The profoundly beautiful refrain is heard
softly in the background at night and certainly sounds as though it could be authentic. Surprisingly, Tiomkin made it up when Hawks decided that the actual song was terribly banal. John Wayne liked it so much that he appropriated it for
The Alamo
.

Folmar Blangsted, the editor, got a rough cut assembled in less than three weeks, and the first screening in August convinced everyone at Warner Bros.
that they had a big hit on their hands. Although the film was ready for release by late 1958, the studio decided to hold it back until March 18 of the following year, when it opened at the Roxy in New York City. Two days later, it took the country by storm, snaring the number-one spot nationally in its first week of release with giant numbers almost everywhere. It then lodged at number two for
two weeks, behind
Some Like It Hot
, and enjoyed a sustained life through the spring. By the time it was done,
Rio Bravo
amassed rentals of $5.2 million, making it the tenth biggest box-office film of 1959 and the second highest earner of Hawks’s career, after
Sergeant York
. It also did enormous business overseas, where Ricky Nelson was extraordinarily popular.

It almost goes without saying that
Rio Bravo
was not perceived as a serious piece of work at the time of its release. Even when they were directed by John Ford, John Wayne Westerns were only grudgingly praised by the critics of the time, for whom lofty intentions and aspirations counted for much more than storytelling talent and mise-en-scène. If a filmmaker then threw the likes of Dean Martin and Ricky Nelson into the mix, there
was simply no hope that the film would be taken as anything other than an efficient popular entertainment. Besides, when was the last time Hawks had tackled material that was challenging or reputable? Since World War II, he had seen fit to do a mystery, a couple of Westerns and comedies, a musical and a quasimusical, a science-fiction cheapie, and a lousy epic. In the literary-oriented critics’
minds, the last time Hawks had tackled truly ambitious subject matter was
Sergeant York
and, perhaps,
Air Force
. More-over, Hawks’s interests seemed to have gotten more generic and trivial since the war, while Oscar favorites such as George Stevens and William Wyler had become more brooding and deliberate.

All of this may help explain why Hawks, by the mid-1950s, had been relegated to the second
tier of Hollywood filmmakers by much of the establishment, and why his reputation was in need of resuscitation by critics and buffs in the 1960s. Despite his track record and the absolute control he exercised over his projects, Hawks was viewed as being closer to the level of Michael Curtiz or William Wellman, fine directors who nonetheless worked mostly on assignment, than to the most respected
figures of the moment, such supposedly finicky and meticulous filmmakers as Wyler, Zinnemann, Stevens, or Kazan.
Rio Bravo
, for instance, was not nominated for a single Academy Award, but the following year, even Wayne’s rambling, verbose, undeniably deeply felt
The Alamo
was nominated for seven.
The Alamo
got attention partly because of Wayne’s personal popularity but more because it was a grand,
self-important picture that was “about” something bigger than just another Western standoff.

It is safe to say that very few people in the United States in 1959 looked at
Rio Bravo
within the context of Howard Hawks’s entire career. Not long after, however, Peter Bogdanovich had the insight to observe that John Wayne’s character in the picture was an extension of the roles played by Cary Grant
in
Only Angels Have Wings
and Humphrey Bogart in
To Have and Have Not
, which suggested that there lurked within Hawks’s work some consistencies, themes, motifs, and preoccupations that had previously gone undetected. It was a number of years, though, until the image of
Rio Bravo
was transformed from “one of the better class oaters of the year,” as
Variety
called it at the time, into a film about
which Robin Wood could say, “If I were asked to choose a film that would justify the existence of Hollywood, I think it would be
Rio Bravo
.” Even for those unwilling to go that far, the film fully justifies serious appreciation of Hawks, since it represents the most detailed and elegant expression of his typical concerns—self-respect, self-control, the interdependence of select chosen friends,
being good at what you do, the blossoming of sexual-romantic attraction—as demonstrated by characters utterly removed from the norms of routine existence. The Hemingway imperative of grace under pressure could not be rendered more perfectly, and the stoicism is shot through with fun, a full statement of a philosophy of life by a man whose instinctive but deeply thoughtful artistry lay in his seasoned
ability to use a highly collaborative shooting process to his own ends.

Rio Bravo
is also, of course, Hawks’s consummate “boy’s fantasy,” fitting snugly with Hollywood mythmaking and escapism, which is what has helped make the film so enduringly appealing, especially to young men.
And while many films that one loves as a teenager reveal their shallowness later on,
Rio Bravo
ultimately shows itself
to be an exceedingly mature film within the trappings of an adolescent adventure;
Rio Bravo
is Hawks’s most resolved film in the sense that it is a thorough expression of the man, without any tension whatever among its narrative, genre, personal, and commercial ambitions. As Jean-Luc Godard put it,
Rio Bravo
“is a work of extraordinary psychological insight and aesthetic perception, but Hawks
has made his film so that the insight can pass unnoticed.… Hawks is the greater because he has succeeded in fitting all that he holds most dear into a well-worn subject.”

Robin Wood’s analysis of Hawks’s masterpiece still stands as a model of film criticism and exhibits as deep an understanding of, and appreciation for, what Hawks was all about as has ever been written. Not surprisingly, the
film’s richness has drawn out the best in numerous critics and scholars. While noting the exclusion of women from the atmosphere she found “clubby and reassuring in the male enclosure,” Molly Haskell described it as “a movie one loves and returns to as to an old friend.” Jean-Pierre Coursodon, in his book
American Directors
, found it “an all but perfect movie.” Describing it as “rigorously abstract,”
Greg Ford confirmed the film’s position as “the consummate working epitome of Hawks’s most talked-about overview-blueprint for movies.” Among the current generation of working filmmakers,
Rio Bravo
stands among the greatest of all movies: John Carpenter essentially remade it as
Assault on Precinct 13
, and Martin Scorsese excerpted it in his first film.

Ironically, while making so mellow and confident
a film, both Wayne and Hawks were losing a grip on their marriages. Dependent on prescription drugs and alcohol, Wayne’s wife, Pilar, sank into a deep depression with which Wayne was completely unprepared to deal. In September 1958, the couple separated, and soon thereafter, while Wayne was making
The Horse Soldiers
, Pilar attempted suicide. They eventually patched things up and remained married
another fifteen years, but the period during
Rio Bravo
represented a low point in their relationship.

As for Hawks, his keen interest in Gregg was unlike anything he had shown in any of his previous children. Despite his age, Hawks displayed an enthusiasm for and an engagement in his young son that far surpassed the energy he was devoting to Dee. Various friends, notably Chris Nyby, suggested
that Hawks’s libido, low to begin with, all but vanished after Gregg’s birth. Dee, barely thirty, certainly didn’t feel like spending the next twenty years watching her husband slip into dotage. By 1958, it was clear that the marriage was beginning to gasp. Although Dee and Gregg temporarily continued
to live with Hawks at the house at 914 North Roxbury Drive in Beverly Hills, they officially
separated on September 15 of the following year, and Dee filed for divorce two weeks later, citing unspecified mental and physical cruelty. In her complaint, Dee listed among their holdings 13,924 shares of Lafitte, property at 930 Stradella Avenue in Los Angeles, as well as the house and a vacant lot in Palm Springs, several stories and screenplays, a Rolls-Royce, a Ford station wagon, a Thunderbird,
a deposit on a Porsche, and interests in Hawks’s various film companies. As of June 1959, she stated that they had $49,817.74 in the bank, whereas by August all of their accounts showed deficits because during the summer Hawks spent $74,000, including $20,000 on a racehorse. Dee also contended that in 1956 Hawks hid $85,000 “some place in Europe” and mentioned other expenses that were never accounted
for.

While the divorce and disposition of their community property was being adjudicated, Hawks was ordered to pay Dee $3,450 per month. Dee and Gregg temporarily moved to New York City in April 1960, and when a settlement was finally reached in 1963, Dee got custody of Gregg, 37.5 percent of Armada Productions (that is, of Hawks’s share of the
Rio Bravo
profits), the property on Stradella and
the lot in Palm Springs, some furniture, and the Thunderbird. Hawks was also obliged to pay $500 a month in child support. After all of this, Hawks and Dee remained on good terms. Barbara said, “They became much better friends after they split up,” and Hawks even gave Dee a small part in
Red Line 7000
.

Even before
Rio Bravo
wrapped, the word was around town that Hawks was back in a big way. In
July 1958, he turned down an urgent request from Universal to quickly take on a Western called
Viva Gringo
, in which Kirk Douglas and Rock Hudson had agreed to star, and was also paged by Burt Lancaster and his partner Harold Hecht to direct a version of A. B. Guthrie’s Pulitzer Prize–winning follow-up to
The Big Sky, The Way West
, which Hecht had to wait eight years to get made. Despite his stated
objections to the wide-screen format, Hawks initiated plans to next team up with John Wayne on a big production in Cinemiracle, a new three-camera process akin to Cinerama that was first used on the semidocumentary adventure film
Windjammer
. At first they considered doing a Western, and subsequently discussed
Africa
for the format. When Cinemiracle didn’t catch on, Hawks and Cinerama executives
began months of talks; Hawks eventually passed because the heavy equipment wasn’t portable enough for the mobile, spontaneous shooting needed for the animal-chasing scenes.